Research and consulting company, SystemicLogic has developed Innovation Caf'e, a social-based software platform in the cloud that encourages businesses to innovate and collaborate on ideas.
According to SystemicLogic, the platform incorporates the concepts of crowdsourcing and social networking and allows people to create ideas while rating and collaborating on them.
The company says this allows businesses to gather ideas relevant to their business objectives.
Sean O'Reilly, CTO of the Innovation Agency, a brand developed by parent company SystemicLogic, says often businesses lose sight of creativity in a project.
“Innovation is something everyone wants, but often experience difficulty in achieving. Innovation should be part of a business culture.”
O'Reilly points out that the company's target market is the financial services sector, such as top tier banks, as well as insurance companies.
Collaboration is key
O'Reilly says: “The platform invites business users to contribute to specific campaigns or projects. It can range from internal goals the company is trying to achieve, or an external campaign like a public facing one.”
He says the platform facilitates communication across the hierarchal structure of an organisation and enables the flow of communication and context to even get the tea lady and the IT manager to share ideas.
“An internal campaign might be asking employees how to save costs internally. The business community decides which ideas they would like to see go forward.”
Innovating for change
O'Reilly notes that the platform also gives credit to the person who came up with the idea and prevents copyright and patent issues from emerging.
“People with ideas can leverage each other's ideas and can collaborate, provide feedback and build a community network. This is quite different form traditional model in financial businesses.
“It's transparent, so you can see who is coming up with the ideas and who gets credit. We run ecologies, which are hosted off site and they are essentially configured platforms for specific clients,” says O'Reilly.
He notes that one of the challenges is convincing traditional businesses that are information security conscious to share information.
“The platform is configured for a client based on specific requirements; the way the business positions itself for ideas from outside communities will be different to the way it's managed internally.”
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